Tuesday 1/24/23
Scott Rolen was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame tonight, as he should have been. People then whine and reveal their utter stupidity on the various social media platforms. You will not find a single statement born of or marked by an iota of intelligence, so I figured I'd quickly post this entry, which is really all one needs.
Look: sports are really simple. This isn't hard. If sports are hard for you and you're a sport fan, and you don't know why these things work as they do, then you can't comprehend anything in this life, let alone anything non-simple. But sports are really, really simple. This isn't understanding what Bach was up to in Art of Fugue.
Rolen gets in, and then people go off about, say, Gary Sheffield, who had this many more home runs, this many more RBI.
That does not matter contextually. You are competing against the other guys who played your position. If you are one of the top fifteen or so players at that position--certainly a position like third base, which is what Rolen played--you will make the Hall of Fame. You're not competing against outfielders. You're not competing against pitchers.
If we did the thing where we just compare numbers, we'd have like two catchers in the Hall of Fame. Do you think there should be two catchers in the Hall of Fame? Probably not, right?
My goodness people are thick. I see these burly guys who live for sports, who have nothing else in their lives, and they're this dumb about sports? The thing they know "best"? That's so depressing. People going off about Andruw Jones, too. We took care of that here in these pages. Again, it's very simple. You just have to look at some numbers and think a tiny bit. If that.
There is also a shortage, to date, of third basemen in the Hall of Fame. The Hall tells a story of the game's history. To tell that story, focusing on its best players, you need more or less equal representation at all of those positions. So yes, of course Rolen is going to be there.
Then we have people bring up Harold Baines. Yeah. Sorry to break this to anyone, but Harold Baines absolutely belongs in the Hall of Fame. You have to have Baines in the Hall of Fame. You might not like it, you might think he wasn't some superstar, but tough. The man had more RBI than Mike Schmidt, Rogers Hornsby, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle. So what the hell else are you going to do with him? He had over 2800 hits. You might not understand how he reached those numbers, but he did.
People get to the Hall of Fame all kinds of ways. Some are dominant for ten amazing years. Or a handful, like with Koufax. Baines belongs as much as he does, if not more. Some are awesome for six years, pretty good for five, a little above average for three, then below average for a few more, and they get there. Some guys are comets. Some guys have numbers and they are huge numbers and you don't know where they came from but I'm sorry, more RBI than Schmidt, Hornsby--so, one of the greatest power hitters of all-time and the best right-handed hitter of all-time--and that dude is going to be there. He also played when numbers were lower.
This is as basic as sports get. I was saying to someone today that the typical NFL fan is often a borderline drooling, no-necked quasi-illiterate. Look at Portnoy. Do you know what a vacuous ball of mucus-slime incarnate that guy is? His life is mostly sports, right? And pizza. And apparently--allegedly--sexual assault and spitting in the mouths of women. He thinks Super Bowl is one word. What is more basic than that? How many hundreds of thousands of times do you see the words Super Bowl? And he doesn't know.
As a general rule, football fans are the dumbest of the dumb, so far as sports fans go. Uncultured, uncouth, sloppy, primitive but soft, embarrassing, immature, total mental slobs. There are virtually no football fans who are thinking people. Hockey fans are smarter usually. And baseball fans. But God are these people dumb, too. I knew this shit when I was like five. How can you be fifty-five and have no idea how this works and how it should work? Want to compare second basemen numbers to right fielder numbers? So no second baseman should be in the Hall of Fame? So everyone in the Hall of Fame should be an outfielder, a first baseman, or a pitcher for the most part?
You are competing against the guy who played the position you played. Primarily. Shortstops are not supposed to hit like corner outfielders. Left fielders are not supposed to defend like shortstops. What is hard about this? If you take any catcher and pretend he was a right fielder, who is getting into the Hall? Piazza? Bench? Probably not with Bench. The two MVPs might tip it in his favor, but he'd still probably be light. You could argue that Johnny Bench is one of the twenty best baseball players of all-time. So he shouldn't be in the damn Hall of Fame but Gary Sheffield should? That is insane.
Then you have people who say, "You know why Rolen is in and not Sheffield. Sounds white to me."
Oh my Christ. Shut up. Enough with the race shit. The only people into the race shit are the actual racists and the virtue signalers who are always wretched people. Shut the hell up already. No one else cares. It is so exhausting having to see race race race race race race race because of some racists who want there to be racism so they can bitch about something and get attention and maybe make some money while others get bombarded with their constant hypocrisy. No one else gives a damn, save that it is always pushed in their face. And besides, racism doesn't even work that way right now in our society. It has gone the other way. So they also might be sick of the constant racism nonsense because now they're a victim of it, but no, that's not allowed, can't say that, have to pretend it doesn't happen.
Ken Boyer is another third baseman who should be in. He was considerably better than Rolen, actually.
